THE NEW YORKER ing to do just that. The nomination hung in limbo for a month while, according to the Washington Post, the Democrats tried to persuade Bush to withdraw it. They failed, and when Gregg came up before the committee again, in mid-June, Senator Claiborne Pell, the chairman, and two other Democrats backed down and voted with the Republicans for the nomina- tion. Cranston and six other Demo- crats voted in the minority against it. The committee vote was a sign of the collective amnesia that was settling over the Iran-Contra affair. Another sign was the fact that few remarked on the connection between the Gregg hearing and the North trial, though the two proceedings took place within blocks of each other on Constitution Avenue. Of course, the connection was far from direct, but it would have appeared in the narrative that the sena- tors would have had to construct link- ing Gregg to the resupply. That nar- rative is a story in and of itself; and, because the Iran-Contra committees did not focus on Bush's role in the Contra affair, it must be laboriously pieced together out of cables, memos, and bits of testimony from a score of witnesses. To follow the trail showing Gregg's involvement in the resupply operation, it is necessary first to plunge off into the underbrush of the Contra affair and encounter all kinds of new characters, including Salvadoran of- ficers and Cubans from Miami. But eventually the trail winds back to Richard Secord and Oliver North. Rodriguez was, it turns out, the only independent witness to the inner work- ings of the organization that North and Secord created in Central America to deliver arms to the Contras After being recruited by North, in Septem- ber, he gradually came to see, from his vantage point in EI Salvador, that the organization was filled with renegades and profiteers. Astonishingly, he and Gregg were the only ones to confront North about the corruption of the Se- cord enterprise and to warn of the danger it posed to the Administration. Thus, to show how Gregg "systemati- cally misled" the Iran-Contra commit- tees is, oddly, to gain the only con- temporary perspective on the Contra operation which was remotely clear- headed. It is also to see a side of North 75 that his jurors, among others, never saw. Felix Rodriguez, a.k.a. Max Go- mez, was, and is, a character fit for a spy novel. Born in Cuba, he attended school in the United States and emi- grated permanently in 1958, two years before his high-school graduation. From there he went directly to a C.I.A. training camp for Cubans, in Central America. He infiltrated Cuba two months before the Bay of Pigs invasion, and when the invasion failed he managed to escape through the Venezuelan Embassy in Havana. For some years, he worked out of the C.I.A. station in Miami, reinfiltrating Cuba several times during the various C.I.A. attempts to bring down the Castro regime. He worked in Central America, and later in Venezuela. In 1967, he went to Bolivia on a C.I.A. mission to track down Che Gueva- ra, and was, as it happened, the only foreigner with the Bolivian patrol that found and shot the Cuban leader. He and Guevara had a two-hour con- versation before Guevara died. They were men made of the same cloth- only with different ideological dyes- ,. "'" 1&..1 KER MOU MUSEUM , ',:&-- Turn down street in St. Geórßes 0/' d turn back time. r - Bermuda has a time}e s quality that "youn erH islands can't match. Here you can stroll along, streets that almost four centurIes back served settlers and sailors and pIrate kinßs. Bermuda is one place where the grace of earlIer urnes is still held very dear. Call your travel agent or _ _ I..8oo-BERMUDA r For a free vacatton krt CßU i . 0 BERMlIDA or wnte 1821 t 01 rmuda Department of Tou PO :.x 1105 -side. NY 113 "1 Name- I $ Cf Sfate I It could on1 be errnUUa Jf